Daily Inspiration Quote by Joyce Cary

Cary drops a hand grenade into the cozy fantasy that history is orderly or that people are basically predictable. By calling man a "free creative spirit" "for good and evil", he refuses the comforting split where creativity gets to be noble and destruction is written off as an exception. The line insists that the same imaginative force that builds cathedrals also invents propaganda, financial scams, and better ways to kill. Freedom is not a halo; it's volatility.

The phrase "very queer world" is doing sly work. It isn't just quaint British understatement. It's a novelist's way of naming the mismatch between our appetite for stability and the actual engine of human life: improvisation. "Continuous creation" sounds uplifting until Cary yokes it to "continuous change and insecurity". He punctures the modern craving for systems that guarantee outcomes, whether those systems are political ideologies, bureaucratic planning, or the private rituals we use to pretend tomorrow can be managed.

Context matters: Cary is writing in the shadow of two world wars and the collapse of old certainties, when "progress" had started to look like a technical term for more efficient chaos. As a novelist, he also smuggles in a craft credo. Fiction knows what policy memos hate: individuals don't behave like data. They surprise themselves. Cary's intent is bracing rather than bleak - if the world is always being made, then responsibility can't be outsourced to fate, tradition, or "the times."